A BREATH OF FAITH

A BREATH OF FAITH

I don’t wake up anymore dreading the day ahead. It’s because I studied familiar spirits in the Bible and got rid of the one that was bringing around the tremendous dread every morning. I was delivered from other generational curses passed down in the DNA of my parents, grandparents, and ancestors. But a person can’t study and know about every demon influence that’s traveled down their ancestral path since Adam and Eve. It’s just too much and too convoluted. I’m not condemning studying the Bible for clues to our personal spiritual ancestral history. Knowledge is great, but faith is greater than knowledge. Faith goes beyond what we can get from studying.

I love to study the Bible, but studying can get deceitfully perverted into works: “If I study enough, I can get rid of every demon plaguing or attacking me.” But studying isn’t a requirement for deliverance. Faith is.

Hebrews 11:1 tells us: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The Amplified puts it this way: “Now faith is the assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses].”

Faith believes a thing before it’s seen in our reality. God wants us to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).

It’s in my nature to work. Even when I’m off for the weekend, I end up working in my yard, or cleaning the garage, or organizing the kitchen. But faith is a different type of work. Faith is a yielding work, where we just believe God. We believe that what He’s said in His written Word or said to us by revelation, is true. It’s an intimate thing, personal, and not based on work, but on grace.

Jesus healed iniquities that the people did not know about: the man born blind, the man from the Gadarenes, the man with the withered hand. The Gospels are filled with the wonderful healings and deliverances God did through Jesus Christ. One that especially hits my heart is recorded in Luke 13:11:

“And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.”

If we were reading in the original language, we would know that this infirmity could have been in her body and or in her mind. The infirmity was an inborn weakness or frailty of the body or the soul. It was a lack of strength or even capacity to understand a thing, to restrain corrupt desires, to bear up under trouble or trials, or ever do great things. She just didn’t have it in her. We all know people like that. In this woman’s case, her inborn frailty even affected her posture, and she was bent over under the overall strain of life itself.

“And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, ‘Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.’ And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God” (Luke 13:12-13).

The woman knew this was from God and she honored and celebrated Him for healing her. Life could no longer push her down. Jesus gifted her with the understanding and the strength to do great things and overcome corrupt desires and bear up under trials, things she could never do before.

We all have things that bother us about ourselves, but Jesus is here to heal us off all that. As He said to the man whose son was suicidal: “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” (Mark 9:23).

Got a problem? Jesus has the answer. Let’s respond like the man here did: “And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe” (Mark 9:24).

“When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, ‘Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.

And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose” (Mark 9:25-27).

We believe like the father, and are lifted up like the boy.  And like the woman relieved from her weaknesses, we receive.

Check out the Gospels this week and take a look at Hebrews 11 for great and small leaps of faith. :-)

Love, Carolyn